Press Play with Madeleine Brand: California case: free speech v. abortion rightsCrisis pregnancy centers are generally run by pro-life groups that aim to convince pregnant women not to get abortions. A California law requires that employees tell their clients that the state offers free and low-cost abortions and other family planning services. Now a group of these centers is arguing that the law violates their freedom of speech.

UnFictionalUnbelievably true stories of chance encounters that changed the world. A pair of mail-order shoes that led to the film The Outsiders. A secret road to a California paradise. The day LA and smog first met. Stories that will stick in your head like a memory. It’s UnFictional, hosted by Bob Carlson.

The DocumentThe Document is a new kind of mash-up between documentaries and radio. It goes beyond clips and interviews, mining great stories from the raw footage of documentaries present, past and in-progress. A new episode is available every other Wednesday on iTunes and wherever fine podcasts are downloaded.

To the PointA weekly reality-check on the issues Americans care about most. Host Warren Olney draws on his decades of experience to explore the people and issues shaping – and disrupting - our world. How did everything change so fast? Where are we headed? The conversations are informal, edgy and always informative. If Warren's asking, you want to know the answer.

The Italy referendum and the populist march on Europe

First there was Brexit, now Italy's political instability is threatening the European Union. Liberal democracies are under siege in other parts of the world. What's the relationship to Donald Trump's victory over America's political establishment?

FROM THIS EPISODE

The Washington Post reports that the Pentagon buried an internal study documenting no less than $12 billion in wasteful spending. The Post says bureaucrats were trying to protect the military from new cuts in the Defense Budget. Mandy Smithberger is director of the Straus Military Reform Project on the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, the consensus of Western politics was that more countries would evolve into liberal democracies and stay that way. The European Union was seen as the model but, this week, Italy's centrist Prime Minister was driven from office -- hard on the heels of Brexit. Matteo Renzi announced his resignation after losing a referendum to restructure a famously chaotic government. There's right-wing nationalism in France and Germany -- and Donald Trump won by directly assaulting America's political establishment. We look at evidence that liberal democracies aren't as stable as they were previously cracked up to be.

Retired Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn arrives at Trump Tower inNew York to meet with President-elect Donald Trump, November 29, 2016. (Mike Segar/Reuters)

A Washington pizza restaurant called Comet Ping Pong first received abusive messages, then death threats and, finally, a visit by an armed man who said he was there to protect children from sex-abuse and trafficking. He fired shots, but hit no one and submitted to arrest when it turned out the reports he’d seen were untrue. But the source of those rumors has been traced to reports on social media circulated by the son of a powerful advisor to Donald Trump, as Cecilia Kang reports in the New York Times.